The Mother of Tension: Hip Hop Dance Theatre Performance

A ground-breaking new Hip Hop dance theatre piece.

The Mother of Tension will be performed again at Nottingham Playhouse on 6 July at the Inspire Youth Arts Showcase! Book your ticket.

Background

The Mother Of Tension, a ground-breaking new Hip Hop dance theatre piece commissioned by the Imperial War Museum featuring talented young dancers from across the region, explores themes of conflict whilst highlighting lived experiences informed by resources from Nottinghamshire Archives. Drawing on a Hip Hop movement vocabulary, and accompanied by an original music score and visual motion design, all adding to the powerful and emotive aesthetic of the piece.

This exciting collaboration between Inspire Youth Arts and Inspire Archives is part of the IWM 14-18 NOW Legacy Fund, a national programme of 22 artist commissions inspired by the heritage of conflict and created in partnership with Imperial War Museums (IWM) and 14-18 NOW, the official UK arts programme for the First World War centenary.

To mark the end of the First World War centenary, Imperial War Museums and 14-18 NOW worked together to co-commission the critically acclaimed film They Shall Not Grow Old by Academy Award winner Peter Jackson, which was seen by nearly 5 million people globally. Following the unprecedented success of the film, 14-18 NOW and IWM agreed that a share of the film’s royalties would be used to support a new programme of artist commissions, the IWM 14-18 NOW Legacy Fund. A total of £2.5 million has been made available to artists and cultural organisations across the UK.

The piece was performed on Sunday 5 March 2023, 7.30pm at Djanogly Theatre, Lakeside Arts Nottingham.

Creative process

Inspire commissioned a hip-hop theatre performance co-created with local and national Artists: choreographers Gareth Woodward and Jasmine M Eccles, multimedia artist and creative technologist Rebecca Smith (Urban Projections), composer Jimmy Power, and young people from diverse backgrounds across Nottinghamshire. The performance will explore the impact of the conflict of the First World War on freedoms of individuals, families and communities and how it continues to shape our future.

Young people attended sessions at Inspire Nottinghamshire Archives to explore hidden stories from the archives relating to themes of war and conflict from the First World War onwards as part of their production research, and then rehearsing to develop the show and its soundtrack.

The team would like to thank FABRIC and Dance4 for their support of rehearsal space.